Category: compositions

A small cohort from Dog Star Orchestra will be performing at the GAS Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 28 and 29. At the latter of the two shows a new piece of mine titled still life: North Puyallup River Bridge will be premiered for quartet (bass flute, horn, viola, guitar) alongside work by Erika Bell, Laura Steenberge, Michael Pisaro, and Yoko Ono. The piece is an arrangement of harmonies found near the origin of the North Puyallup River on Mt. Rainier.

short video from the performance on June 3, 2018. the piece consists of 9-tone ‘chains’ which must be arranged in a harmonic lattice structure (this performance uses the (2,3), (3,5), and (5,7) planes—an x,y graph where each axis represents a harmonic ratio).

The 14th season of Dog Star Orchestra begins Saturday June 2. On Sunday June 3 at Human Resources in Chinatown, I will present a new piece lattice chains for an 8 channel modular sound system designed with Janie Geiser, Eric Heep, and Cassia Streb. Eric Heep, Sepand Shahab, Stephanie Smith, and Cassia Streb will also be presenting pieces.

Two new events planned as part of this year’s Dog Star Orchestra festival. June 4, I’ll be playing Tom Johnson’s Nine Bells on a specially-tuned set of bells I’ve built. June 14, Isaura String Quartet will perform ‘rhythm color #3’ alongside the Southland String Quartet performing works by James Tenney and Tom Johnson.

Isaura String Quartet will be premiering my piece “parallel lines (do not intersect)” on their final concert of their summer series. For the concert they asked 7 different LA composers to reimagine Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. My piece, which borrows its name from Blondie’s album title, begins with a chorale, of sorts, in two separate 3-limit harmonic spaces (4ths, 5ths, and octaves)—a kind of harmonic parallelism. The concert will be followed by pie and drinks to celebrate the final concert.

Click here for more info and email isaurastringquartet@gmail.com to RSVP and receive directions to the location in Eagle Rock.

I have had the pleasure of working with Randolyn Zinn and The Living Room Theatre on a few projects. They have developed their own type of site-specific theatre at the Park McCullough House in North Bennington, VT over the past couple summers. I have contributed music for this summer’s production of Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’. The score sets abstracts from Bartók, Scriabin, and Russian folk tunes against field recordings and various types of resonators and feedback engines.

A new piece for two writers will be presented this Friday at the wulf, along with new pieces by Todd Lerew, Chris Schunk, and Danny Wood. The piece utilizes excerpts from Søren Kierkegaard’s diaries including an entry labeled: “Something about my Punctuation” (1847), which discusses something of K’s unusual rhetorical style.

Dog Star Orchestra returns in June for its tenth year of experimental music concerts. The fabulous duo Guthrie & Streb will be premiering my piece ‘groups, no. 2’ for viola and cello at the wulf on Friday, June 6, at 8 pm. The program focuses on counting, including Tom Johnson’s Counting Duets.

The rhythm color pieces explore harmony as a function of time. While the first two deal with the standard rhythmic metric, #3 deals with time as a function of counting/calculation (individual) and power dynamics (group). Dealing with the Pythagorean tuning relationships between the five pitch classes of the open strings of the quartet (C, G, D, A, E), the players are presented with a grid-like score of pitches/numbers; each cell with the instruction to be either played, not played, or left to the players to decide.